Brett McMahon Elemental

Interview with Brett McMahon

By Sebastian Smee

SS. It has been about six years since you last showed in Sydney,
but in the interim you work has been all over Newcastle, with a big survey show
at the Newcastle Art Gallery, a set of installations at the Lock Up, an
exhibition this year at the Newcastle University Art Gallery, and the
spectacular run of panels you made for the new Courthouse building on Hunter
and Burwood Streets. One of the things you’ve done a lot of, which Sydney
audiences who know you as a painter might not be aware of, is work in three
dimensions.

BM. That
shift began a long time ago. It really started with a group of works on paper
where I started to cut into the paper and use it in a more sculptural way. It’s
been a ten year process. It coincided with my work becoming far sparser than
the work I’d done previously.

SS. To me, there’s a natural continuity between the two-dimensional
works and the sculptural objects you’re making. The wall works are not “windows”
onto another world. They have a very thingy, tangible quality. It comes out in
the textures, and the sense in which they feel like remnants, or as the residue
of various processes.

BM. You’re
right. And I was actually explaining this to my son the other day, talking
about how paintings can operate as windows, but saying that I really like to
make paintings that are objects in themselves. There are still illusionistic
qualities in the work that I’m making. But really what I’m trying to do is to
use the material in an honest way. So I think about how paper can be crumpled
or folded or perforated, and so on. And going through those processes it what
gives the work its narrative, its story.

SS. A couple of works here are titled Accumulation. Do you
think of them, then, as accumulations not only of marks but of processes?

BM. An
accumulation of processes and an accumulation of time. The works are partly inspired by things in nature which show
signs of having been around for a long time. Rock shelves. Fragments of shells.
Old burned out tree trunks. Things that have been witness to a lot, and have been
formed by this. I’m trying to find ways to imbue the works I make with a sense
of having been witness to time. It’s tricky because you might, in making
something, go through a really satisfying process and feel that you’re engaging
with something you’ve seen in nature and being true to that, but the end result
might not be very interesting. So you’re juggling the processes that interest
you with your sense of what is finally interesting to look at. It’s never
straightforward. I don’t know the answers.

SS. Tell me about the materials in the show.

BM. There’s
a wide range. I try to get certain motifs to reappear in different materials. A
mark you might see in a piece of burnt wood might reappear on a piece of paper.
So there’s a series of echoes that links things together in interesting ways.
That’s indicative of the way I’ve been working lately. I’ve just been trying to
draw things together in an intuitive way.

SS. A lot of your early work was tightly constructed, and
acutely sensitive to tensions between levels of space. The results were very
taut. Much of the work in this show has a different quality. It’s relaxed. At
times, it looks almost like it’s coming untethered, even flying apart.

BM. With
hindsight, I think I was looking at the world then in a similar way to now, but
I was trying to use oil paint to replicate the textures and surfaces that
interested me all in the one image. So that it was like a collection of fragments
of the world. Since they were made in the city it made sense that they would
have that tight, locked-together feeling. But I kept looking at those pictures,
and the aspect of them I found dissatisfying was that the end result was too
far removed from the experience I had when I saw the real things that inspired
them. It was too much of a facsimile.

SS. I feel you can really breathe in front of these new
works. Their forms and structures are relaxed, almost fatalistic. And there’s
room to move around them.

BM. Well, I
feel like the way my shows are put together these days borrows a little from
the rhythms of walking through the bush. You’re in something and it unfolds
before you. I’m not trying to jam everything together. It was a great relief
for me when I let things go in this way. And I guess it happened when I
re-engaged with nature. I saw the way things just sat in their own space or
interacted in the way they had to.

SS. What sorts of things did you do that might demonstrate
what you’re talking about?

BM. I
didn’t like the idea of the paint sitting on top of the surface. It was too
applied and felt too false. And so I had to find ways to embed the marks that I
made, to make them part of the material. Maybe it’s a return to what I was
doing a long, long way back, which is working with fabrics. Dying and
bleaching, so that the marks that you made were part of the fabric. That felt
very real. It goes back to what you were saying: It was a thing.

SS. And you’re married now to someone who works very closely
with fabrics, aren’t you?

BM. Yeah!
And that’s brought all that back again. My wife Rowena and her sisters, who run
High Tea with Mrs Woo, are really engaged with beautiful fabrics from Japan.
They have a great sensitivity towards their materials. So it’s been a wonderful
experience for me to be influenced by them. I love the way they look at things.

SS. So how are you “embedding” the painted marks?

BM. I use a
brush that I made out of bush stuff – twigs and fibrous bits of plant – just to
give it a slightly different feel. Those paintings are actually the most
constructed things I’m making at the moment. They’re made with this brush, and
super-heavy linen which I sand back so that I can really push the paint into
the fabric. The paintings are very flat, but they still have a sense of these
marks hovering in a shallow space and having a bit of vibration there.

SS. What sorts of natural process and phenomena have you
found yourself responding to in nature?

BM. I think
a lot about the ocean. Seawater. Wind – the way it marks things or knocks them
together. And I guess heat. The other thing that’s happened in the last few
years is that I’ve moved my making of stuff outside. Everything in the show was
made outside. If it rains it gets wet. If it’s hot it gets hot. And there are
certain things I do. In winter there are westerlies so if I leave my paintings
out on these long lines, they flap around like washing and get a patina.
Sometimes if you leave something out there for a few weeks or months and it’s
been rained on and the wind has got it and it’s a bit frayed around the edges,
it can be kind of perfect. So I am trying to work with and harness things.
Things that usually drive you mad. Working outside in the wind is usually so
frustrating. So you think, What can I make that somehow works with this?

SS. You talked about walking before. Are there particular
places that have informed this work, in the way that your past series have been
inspired by, for instance, the coastal bush of the Awabakal Reserve near
Newcastle. Or does this work represent more of an aggregation of many different
experiences?

BM. It’s a
bit of an aggregation. But there are a couple of spots around Newcastle – the
Glenrock Reserve and the Awabakal Nature Reserve. They’re places I visited when
I was a kid and I just think the form of the bush had an effect on my
aesthetic. Something about it was embedded in my psyche. Other bush doesn’t
really connect with me in the same way. When I get back to those areas, I can
walk into them and it’s my version of church. It feels like the right place for
me to be. The feeling of connection has been growing as I get older.All in all, it’s probably a five kilometer
strip of coastal bush. There’s a lot of variety in the vegetation. The way the
trees grow and twist – certain gnarly angles – you know, it’s always just
right. But then, too, the landscape has witnessed lots of things. Things that
have happened in Australia’s history that are unspoken. Acts of violence in
areas that we think of as pristine nature. I’ve never wanted to explore that in
an overt way, but it’s something that I think about. And so I think about the
work as having this sense of enduring or silently witnessing something. The
unspoken thing is still there, embedded in the piece. The burned blocks in
Frequencies, for instance: you have a sense that there is a lot of information
compressed in them. They might be fragile on the outside but they do have this
resilience, and they let their secrets out slowly.